


Original Work on AO3

by Franzeska



Series: March Meta Matters [9]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:37:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23090443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/pseuds/Franzeska
Summary: A collection of meta posts having to do with the allowing of 'original work' as a "fandom" on AO3
Series: March Meta Matters [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664836
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	1. Original fannish work is most certainly welcome on AO3

**Author's Note:**

> Posted for day 9 of the March Meta Matters Challenge.
> 
> Based on my long ago DW posts it looks like original work was finally allowed on July 11, 2011.  
(AO3 opened for closed beta October 3, 2008 and open beta November 14, 2009.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: November 29, 2018
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/180614865704/ive-been-writing-a-story-for-years-and-im
> 
> By 2018, most of the people using AO3 were not ones who'd been around in 2011, and nobody really remembered the history of this.

Original _fannish_ work is most certainly welcome on AO3 @ao3commentoftheday!

Oh the _fight_ we had making it so! There was a lot of confusion and resistance from some parts of fandom and a “Well, obviously it’s allowed, duh!” reaction from other parts.

Both feelings were so utterly self-evident that it was hard to even understand each other when we discussed it. There are two conceptual frameworks here: In one, the division is **fanfic vs. original work**. In the other, the division is **fannish writing (including original stuff that is fandom-y in some way) vs. non-fannish writing**.

In ye olden times before the m/m ebook boom, a lot of people who wanted to write m/m that was not fanfic didn’t bother trying to publish in any conventional way. There simply weren’t many venues available to them to do so. Once upon a time, they might have published an original m/m zine alongside fanfic zines. In (slightly) more recent times, they were posting to mailing lists alongside fic writers and later to Livejournal and Dreamwidth.

A few of these works ended up being conventionally published (e.g. Captive Prince). Many remained not-for-profit and in a fannish realm. Some that had limited print runs ended up back on AO3, returning to their fannish roots. I heartily recommend all of [Parhelion’s work](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&include_work_search%5Bfandom_ids%5D%5B%5D=2692&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&user_id=Parhelion).

Fanfiction.net split off its original component years ago, but the same is not true of some of the big fic archives in other languages. It also wasn’t true of a lot of themed archives like Boys in Chains. In fact, it was Open Doors trying to handle that archive that inspired a lot of us to agitate to change AO3′s policies about “original” work. The archive was a big part of many people’s fannish history and had been offline for a while. AO3 was willing to import it as-is; the archivist wanted it to be a living archive where all of the authors were welcome to post new work. After a knock-down, drag-out fight about the definition of ‘fannish’, the rules eventually changed, and that archive is now on AO3 as the revamped [Chains: The Powerfic Archive](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/chains/) (no longer limited to m/m).

A mix of original work and fanfic has been the norm in many parts of fandom, especially when there’s some other component in common, like m/m or f/f content. These days, more and more fic exchanges allow ‘original work’ as one of the fandoms. Fandomy things like that are welcome on AO3. It’s only advertising spam and intentionally non-fannish works that aren’t.


	2. My dudes, AO3 allows original work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: March 25, 2019.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183812147034/hi-salt-thanks-for-you-blog-recently-i
> 
> Someone asked a salty pro-shipper blog what would be a good site to pot original work on, and I realized they didn't know AO3's actual policies.

My dudes, AO3 _allows original work_.

You have to see it as original-but-fannish. It has to be the sort of original work that belongs on a fanfic archive, but you, the author, get to define that. If you’re planning to monetize it later, then Wattpad is probably a better option, but if you just want to leave it up as a free gift to the community alongside your fanfic, AO3 will serve your needs just fine.

Fanfiction.net spun off original work into Fictionpress.com. I’ve never looked at that site, but it’s probably the closest thing to a fanfic site but only allowing original work. From Wattpad to… like… every single German fanfic site, it’s super common to have a site that allows both fic and original works.


	3. Does this mean you could post your original webcomic on ao3? Would that even work?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: March 25, 2019.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/183709078014/does-this-mean-you-could-post-your-original
> 
> A response to me talking about original work in that other reblog, perhaps?

> **Anonymous asked: Does this mean you could post your original webcomic on ao3? Would that even work?**

If you consider your webcomic a “fanwork”, then you could make an AO3 work for it and embed the images in the body of that work. You would need to host the actual images somewhere else. You’d use ‘Original Work’ or the name of the webcomic as the fandom field.

Some parts of fandom see “original” as the opposite of fanworks. Some parts do not.

If you were making comics as part of a fanfic/art/vids + original gift exchange, that would be a good candidate for AO3. If you were doing a few meta comics on being a fan, those might be a good candidate for AO3.

If you were planning to keep to a rigorous update schedule and maybe take your work pro–selling compilation books or merch, advertising your subsequent for-profit works, advertising your patreon–AO3 would be a terrible choice. AO3 wouldn’t give you the room to grow in that way because it’s strictly a not-for-profit fanworks site.

My impression is that there are (or were?) various sites set up with web comics in mind that not only provide the actual image hosting but would be much better for that kind of future growth. The big sticking point is mostly just image hosting for explicit art, especially explicit m/m, but AO3 doesn’t natively have image hosting, so it’s no help there either.

It’s similar to people writing “original slash” in a fandom context vs. people who want to sell their m/m romance novel on Amazon: the actual work might be similar, but the creator’s intent and future plans for that specific work are different.

It gets complicated because the same creators may do both/all at the same time, and people do pull to publish, but if I were contemplating AO3 for webcomics, that’s how I’d make that choice.


	4. Hey, sorry to ask this

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted January 19, 2020.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/190522189414/hey-sorry-to-ask-this-but-a-few-days-ago-i-saw-a
> 
> I had been obliquely salty in some other fandom meta post a few days prior. No doubt I will locate this post during March Meta Matters, but I was too lazy to search for it at the time. (Or for this AO3 work!) 
> 
> The "original work" debate had been an emotionally painful one for me, both because people I was friends with were on the opposite side and failed to understand how much they were telling me that my way of being fannish was _invalid_ and because it happened in an era when it was hard to have an honest debate about AO3 stuff because outside haters would use any hint of negativity to attack everyone. There was an insular, paranoid, defensive attitude going around that was unhealthy. Things are much improved now, both because my successors cleaned things up internally and because AO3 is now so established that a few haters are not a big deal.
> 
> I talked about it at the time, but by 2020, I think I'd forgotten just how _long_ it had been since then. I had the feeling I'd posted copiously about this, but looking at my spreadsheet of shit to import for March Meta Matters, I'm not sure I actually had--at least not on Tumblr. I guess I'd also been a little hesitant because I'd rather not rake specific old LJ friends over the coals for aged fandom wank we should all be big enough to be over by now.
> 
> But as this tumblr response shows, I'm _still butthurt_, and it's an interesting topic, so I'll archive my more recent meta about it.
> 
> The response to this was interesting. Several different people showed up to comment on the vastness of this cultural divide and how alienated they too had been. I recently got a reblog with the tags:
> 
> #interesting read**#also the first time ever I saw a fandom history related post mentioning animexx/non-English-speaking fandom in general**#like#these kinda posts are always interested but always about a part of fandom I was never part of myself#(I ''grew up'' on animexx#before I got into a RPF that had its own website (for English fic) and was openly welcome on another German platform#and only now within the last 3 or so years have I even begun to look for fic on ao3#so it still feels very very new to me XD')#anyway#fandom#fandom history#ao3#fanfiction
> 
> I mean, in retrospect, yes, I was a _gigantic_ drama queen about this issue and, indeed, when writing up this tumblr post... but look at that tag I bolded. That tells you something.

> **cowboyformitski asked: Hey, sorry to ask this, but a few days ago I saw a post/discussion about the history of original work on ao3 (i.e. how and when it was allowed). I thought it was in my likes, but it's not, and I thought you had reblogged it recently, but I didn't find it. I was wondering if you have seen this discussion around? Or where I can find more about it? This specific post talked abt how who defended original work on ao3 were not the BNFs, if that helps.**

That was me running my mouth in the reblogs of something or other. It’s just the one comment.

But what’s that you say? Some tl;dr about a pet topic? Don’t mind if I do! ;) (To be honest, most of this debate happened years ago, and a lot of the long meta was by me back then too, so…)

Okay, so, the situation with Original Works is actually super interesting and a microcosm of early years OTW wank.

This is going to be even more tl;dr than my usual. To try to summarize very briefly:

There were two big cultural factions. One thought “original” was the opposite of “fan”. That one was in charge of OTW. It was hard to get voices from the other side into the debate because they already felt excluded from OTW.

This divide broke down more or less into Ye Olde Slash Fandom on the “it’s the opposite” side and anime fandom on the “WTF?” side. Americans on one side and a lot of non-US, non-English language fandom on the other.

**I. Media Fandom, Anime Fandom, and Early OTW**

I went to that first fundraising party that astolat threw in New York City back in… god… 2007? 2008? I wasn’t on the Board or any official position until the committees got started later, but I was around right from the very beginning.

Whether you’re looking at volunteers or at people who commented on astolat’s original post, there were always a variety of fans from a variety of fannish backgrounds. People aren’t absolutely in one camp or another, and fannish interests change over time. If you go dig through Dreamwidth posts to find who was actually participating in this debate at the time, half of them are probably in the other camp now.

If you think like that sounds like a preamble to me making a bunch of offensively sweeping generalizations and divvying fans up into little groups, you’d be right! Haha.

**I.a. Ye Olde Media Fandom**

There are a lot of camps of people who like fanfic. One of the biggest divisions has been Ye Olde Media Fandom vs. anime fandom. Astolat’s social circle–my LJ social circle–was filled with people with decades of fannish experience and a deep knowledge of the Media Fandom side of things.

Those fandom history treatises that start with K/S zines in Star Trek fandom in the 70s and move on through the mainstream buddy cops like Starsky & Hutch to the more niche, sff buddy cops like Fraser and Ray or Jim and Blair are talking about Media Fandom. I try to always capitalize it because the name is lulzy and bizarre to me unless it’s a proper noun for a specific historical thing. It was coined as a rude term for “mass media” fandom aka dumb people who like, ughhhh, Star Trek, ughhh, instead of books. This is a very ancient slapfight from the type of fandom you find at Worldcon, often called “SF fandom” or plain “fandom”.

(Yes, this leads to mega confusion on the part of some old dudes when they find Fanlore and fail to understand that “fandom” there refers to what these people would call “Media Fandom”. They think only they get the unmarked form. But I digress…)

Media Fandom is a specific flavor of fandom. It’s where the slash zines were. It’s where the fans of live action US TV shows were. It’s the history that acafans have laid out well and that tends to get used to defend the idea of a female subculture writing transgressive and transformative fanfic. On the video side, Media Fandom is where Kandy Fong invented vidding by making Star Trek slideshows.

(Kandy’s still around, BTW. She’s usually at Escapade in L.A. Ask her to tell you about the [dancing penises sketch](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Dancing_Penises) in person. She’s hilarious.)

Astolat and friends had been going to slash cons for years. They founded Vividcon. And Yuletide. That meant that when astolat said “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” we all jumped to help. This is a lady who gets things done.

From a Worldcon perspective, or even from an older Media Fandom perspective, this group was comparatively young, hip, and welcoming. Their fandom interests were comparatively broad. Just look at Yuletide!

In fact, yes, let us look at Yuletide… [ominous music]

**I.b. Yuletide sucks at anime**

From the very first year (2003), Yuletide mods have asked for help with anime fandoms, been confused about anime fandoms, or made bad judgment calls about anime fandoms. They’ve fucked up on Superhero comics and plenty of other things over the years, but anime has been the most consistent (well, and JRPGs, but there’s so much overlap in those fic fandoms).

There was already bad feeling about this. There were _years_ of bad feeling about this.

**I.c. Where are the historians?**

Academic study of fanficcy things pretty much got started with _Textual Poachers_ and _Enterprising Women_. Other acafans who are well known to LJ and later Tumblr are people like Francesca Coppa who wrote a very nice summary of the history of Media Fandom. These are not the only academics who exist, these academics _themselves_ have written about many other things, and by now, OTW’s own journal has covered a lot of other territory, but _to this day_ I see complaints on Tumblr that “acafans” only care about K/S and oldschool slash fandom.

There were years of bad feeling about this as well.

**I.d. What kind of fan was I?**

Now, by the time OTW got started, I’d moseyed over to not only a lot of live action US TV but a lot of old-as-fuck US TV that is squarely in the Media Fandom camp. But once upon a time, I was a weeaboo hanging out with my weeaboo friends in college. I learned Japanese (sort of). I moved to Japan. Livin’ the weeaboo dream!

More importantly, I used to be a member of a lot of anime mailing lists back in the Yahoo Groups days. I didn’t realize what a cultural gap that would cause until the original works issue came up on AO3.

**I.e. Anime Fandom, German-language Fandom, Original M/M**

Once upon a time–namely in that Yahoo Groups era–there was an archive called Boys in Chains. It was where you found The Good Stuff™. Heavy kink and power exchange galore! It was extremely well known in the parts of fandom I was in, even if you weren’t on the associated mailing list. It contained lots of fic, but it also had lots of original work.

Around that same era, I was on a critique list called Crimson Ink, which was mixed fic and original. The “original slash” and “original yaoi” crowds mixed freely and were in fanfic spaces. Remember, this is like 2003. You’re never going to get your gay fantasy novel published in English in the US. A couple of fangirl presses started around then, but they died an ignominious death after their first print run.

Fanfiction.net used to allow original work before it spun that off into FictionPress. We forget this today, but if you were an early FFN person, the separation wasn’t so great either.

Meanwhile, German-language fandom was hanging out on sites like Animexx.de, a big-ass fic archive that prominently mentions also including original work. I have the impression that Spanish-language fandom was similar too.

[Shousetsu Bang*Bang](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Shousetsu_Bang*Bang) was founded in 2005. It was a webzine for original m/m, but it was entirely populated by fanfic fandom types.

In all of those kinds of spaces, there was a lot of “original” work that was kind of slash or BL-ish and seen as fannish if it was posted in the fannish space. These weren’t anime-only spaces. They were multifandom spaces where it was seen as obvious and normal that a couple of huge fandoms like Harry Potter would dominate but that everything else big would naturally be anime.

While fans from every background are everywhere, I found that the concentration of EFL fans living in Continental Europe, South America, and Asia was much higher in this kind of space, even the exclusively English language part of it, than in my US TV fandoms.

**II. AO3 Early Adopters**

AO3 went into closed beta in 2009. In 2010, it was open to the general public (albeit with the invitation queue it still has). But not everyone was interested yet. Just like fandom is loath to leave the dying, shambling mess of Tumblr, fandom was loath to leave dwindling LJ/DW circles or was happy enough on Fanfiction.net. I used to see a lot of posts like “Why are you guys trying to STEAL fanfic from the original! FFN is enough!”

I literally could not _give away_ the invitations I had. No one wanted them.

So who was on AO3? Obviously enough, it was all of us who built it and our friends. So that means a bunch of oldschool Livejournal slashers coming from fandoms like Due South or Stargate Atlantis.

The queue was open. Anyone could make an account. Everyone was welcome. In theory…

But more and more, there started to be these posts about how “AO3 Hates Anime Fandom” and “FFN is for anime. AO3 is for Western fandoms.” and “If you guys actually wanted anime fandom on there, you’d invite us better and make us more welcome.”

At the time, I found these posts obnoxious. People aren’t purely in one sort of fandom or the other. No one was stopping anime fandom from making accounts. No one was banning anime fandom. If there wasn’t much from old fandoms, that was because old fandoms seldom move.

Things began to change. Trolls on FFN forced the Twilight porn writers out, creating enough fuss and brouhaha to mobilize people who would rather have stayed put. AO3 got big enough that randos found it by accident. Original work started to pop up, posted by people who’d never looked at the rules and had no idea it was not allowed.

**III. History of AO3’s Policy**

I had argued for allowing “original work” during the initial discussions about the ToS. On one side of this issue was me. On the other, everyone else on the committee.

I was overruled.

Open Door started importing old archives to save them. Boys in Chains was hugely important to fandom history from my point of view. It was slated to be imported… maybe. Except that Boys in Chains is half original. AO3 was happy to grandfather in those stories, but the final archive owner felt, quite rightly, that it would be unfair to tell half of the authors they were welcome in the new space while spitting on the other half.

I was pissed. I had _been_ pissed since being overruled the first time. To me, the fact that it should be allowed was so blatantly obvious that it was hard to even explain _why_.

(To be honest, this difficulty in explaining why and the even greater difficulty in figuring out the source of that difficulty is what held the discussion back for so long. When every assumption on either side is completely opposite, it’s hard to communicate.)

I felt betrayed. It would be like if you helped build something, and everyone was suddenly like “Well, obviously, we can’t allow m/m. It’s not _normal_ fanfic.”

So we discussed it again and, again, it was me vs. literally everyone else. And still the “AO3 is only for Western slash fandom” bitching rose in volume and more and more people complained of feeling excluded from the new fandom hub. Finally, the committee agreed to open the issue up for public comment and get some more input. I was a fool and neither wrote nor proofread the post. It went out phrasing the question as allowing “non fannish” work or something of that sort.

I was furious. The _entire point_ of the whole debate was that I saw some original work, the original work that belongs on AO3, as inherently fannish. And now this had been presented to the AO3 audience as something completely different. Think pieces were popping up in the journals of everyone I knew about diluting AO3’s mission and how we needed to save AO3 from encroachment. Public opinion was very negative. That’s both because of how the post was phrased and because OTW die hards at the time were mostly from the same fannish background. This tidal wave of negativity meant that there was virtually no chance of changing this poisonous rule. And if the rule didn’t change, the people who wanted the rule change were never going to show up to explain why it mattered.

If you’ve been reading my tumblr, I think you can guess what happened next.

I posted a long post to my Dreamwidth. It was a masterwork of passive aggression. In it, I wrung my hands about how simply tragic it would be if AO3 had to delete all of the original work… like [anthropomorfic](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Anthropomorfic).

Now, I think anthropomorfic counts as fanfic as much as anything else, but I also knew that it fails most rigorous “based on a canon” type definitions of fic and, more importantly, it’s a favorite Yuletide fandom of many of the people on the side that wanted to ban original work.

_That’s a nice fandom of yours. It would be a pity if something happened to it. _

Yup. Passive aggressive blackmail. Go me. Suddenly, there was a lot of awkward backtracking and confused running in circles in various journals. The committee agreed to table the idea for a while but not rule out the idea of allowing original works in the future. We agreed to halt all deletions of original work. If a fan posted it, the Abuse Committee (which I was also head of at the time) would not delete that work even though it was technically against the rules.

Time passed. The people on the negative side got tired. I wanted off that committee and had wanted off for ages, but I was _damned_ if I was going to leave before ramming through this piece of policy. Grudgematch till I die! (Look, I never said I wasn’t a wanker.)

After a while, some other fans came forward with more types of “original work” as evidence that it should be allowed. These were from parts of fandom none of us on the committee knew a damn thing about.

This new evidence combined with the gradual accretion of original stuff on AO3 without the sky falling eventually led us to quietly rule Original Work a valid fandom. There was never even a big announcement post. I slipped a word to the Boys in Chains mod myself.

**IV. What _Were_ They So Afraid Of Anyway?**

So why were people so resistant? Seems like a dick move, right?

Not exactly.

I mean, I was enraged and waged a one-woman war to change the rules, but the other side wasn’t nuts. The objections were usually the following:

I just don’t get why it _would_ be allowed. It never was in _my_ fannish spaces.  
Most of our members don’t want this.  
Most of the examples of things that ought to be included are m/m. We are privileging m/m if we allow it, and AO3 already has a m/m-centric reputation that can feel exclusionary to some fans.  
AO3 is a young, shaky platform that can barely handle the load and content we already have. If we open to original work, we’ll be opening the floodgates. The volume of posting will be so high, it will drown out the fic we’re actually here to protect.  
Protecting stuff that doesn’t need protection because it’s not an IP issue would dilute OTW’s mission.  
If we allow it, idiots will try to turn AO3 into advertising space, posting only the first chapter and a link to where you can pay to read the rest.  
If we add another category of text before we add fan art, that’s a slap in the face of the fan artists we are already failing.  
These arguments all make perfect sense in context.

Obvously, the issue with the first two is that different fannish communities have different norms. I knew that a very large community disagreed with the then current AO3 policy, but since so few of them were around to comment, it seemed like a tiny fringe minority.

The m/m thing is… complex. M/M content with zero IP issues is at risk. It is always at risk in a way that even f/f is not (though f/f is also always at risk). Asking for m/m to be exactly equivalent to f/f or m/f in numbers, tropes, whatever is ignoring the historical realities. In our current moment of queer activism in the West, we treat all types of queerness as part of one community with one set of goals, but once you get to culture and art or even more specific activism, this forced homogenization is neither useful nor healthy.

OTOH, AO3 really did have PR problems related to the perception that we gave m/m fandom the kid glove treatment. That objection wasn’t coming from nowhere.

AO3 was shaky. It was tiny when I first brought up this argument. Hell, it wasn’t even in closed beta the first time we discussed this. Part of what made the quiet rules change possible was AO3 organically getting much bigger and OTW having to buy many more servers for unrelated reasons.

The “floodgates” thing was put to rest by tacitly allowing original work before the rules change. We had a period to study how fans _actually_ behaved, and as I predicted, only a small amount of original work got posted. It was indeed mostly things like original BL-ish stories or original work that had been part of a mixed original/fic fest, exchange, zine, etc. Currently, the “Original Work” fandom on AO3 only has 76,348 works. That’s pretty big compared to individual fandoms but tiny compared to AO3’s current size.

The commercial argument was spurious because commercial spam had been against the rules from the very beginning. OH THE IRONY that nowadays AO3 has all these idiots trying to post the first chapter of their fanfic and then direct you to where you can buy the rest.

AO3 has plenty of fanfic of public domain works. One of the problems with gatekeeping original work is that any way you try to distinguish it (not based on a specific canon, not an IP issue, etc.) will apply to some set of obviously allowable fandoms.

As for fan art… OTW _has_ failed fan artists. They needed protection as much as or even more than fic writers. Just look at Tumblr! If we had succeeded at making DeviantArt but allowing boners, fan art fandom could have been safe all these years. Or when Tumblr inevitably shat the bed, we could have scooped up all those people instead of them scattering to twitter and god knows where.

OTW has failed vidders too, at least in terms of preservation. I know I’m not the only one who thinks this. Other major people from like the first Board and shit have discussed this with me offline. Doing some kind of vidding project, possibly outside of OTW is on a lot of our to-do lists. But at least one of OTW’s biggest victories has been that copyright exemption. OTW has demonstrably done really positive things for vidders that other organizations and sites have not. As a vidder, I never expected to see good hosting for the actual video files, and I’m quite content.

But fan artists… yeah. That argument makes sense at least from a place of frustration.

BTW, for the love of god, if you’re a n00b to OTW stuff, please do not reblog this post excitedly telling me that hosting fan art is on OTW’s road map, so yay, good news. Someone always does that, and it’s so irritating. I haven’t been involved in OTW in years, but I used to be, and I know what is on the roadmap. The couple of you who do heavy lifting on sysadmin and coding and policy things are welcome to weigh in as usual. I know none of us like that we can’t host fan art. It’s not what we intended.

Nonetheless, I found this argument to be the perfect being the enemy of the good. If we can save more text now without losing much of anything, we should do it. The fact that we’re fucking up on the fan art front is not a reason to spread the misery around.

**V. Is “Original” the Opposite of “Fanfic”?**

Okay, so that tl;dr above is why “BNFs” were on one side and “nobodies” were on the other. BNFs from one cultural background founded OTW. BNFs from the other cultural background weren’t even aware that the debate was going on.

But what was the underlying philosophical problem in even having the conversation?

It took me a long time, but I finally worked it out: We had two completely different ways of categorizing writing, and they were so baked into how we phrased questions that everything ended up being unanswerable to the other side. Here is what I came up with:

Schema 1

  * **Fanfic** \- based on someone else’s IP
  * **Original Work** \- the opposite

Schema 2

  * **Non-Fannish Work** \- School essays, stories you are writing to try to sell to a mainstream publisher
  * **Fannish Work Type 1** \- based on other people’s characters directly (i.e. fanfic) **Type 2** \- based on tropes or whatever (“original slash” and the like)

Now, in the current moment when half of Tumblr just got into Chinese webnovels and the m/m ebook industry is thriving in English, original, tropey, BL-ish work is no longer different from “things I am trying to sell”. But this is how the divide was circa 2005 on fannish websites, and it’s the divide that was driving this internal OTW debate.

**VI. Let’s Summarize the Camps One More Time**

So, again, the debate makes perfect sense if you understand who was involved.

On the mainstream “But that’s not fanfic? I’m confused?” side:

  * Big US TV fandoms in English
  * Fandom historians of K/S–>buddy cop slash–>SGA, etc.
  * Americans

On the other side:

  * Anime fandom
  * “Original slash” fandom that had already been chased off of everywhere
  * People upset that AO3 wasn’t farther on translating the interface and supporting non-English language fandom.
  * People upset about US-centrism in fandom

Yes, I am very white, very American, and by now very into old buddy cop shows, but this was basically how the breakdown worked. It meant that something that looked like a minor quibble to one side was really, really not.


	5. Austen Fandom Original Work

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted January 23, 2020.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/190430734954/melannen-replied-to-your-post-hey-sorry-to-ask
> 
> This was a response to the previous chapter's post that I popped out as its own post.
> 
> Along with anime being poorly represented amongst early OTW movers and shakers, some of these other types of fandoms, like book fandoms, canons out of copyright, etc. were also not well represented. I'm not really in Austen fandom, but I recall many a debate about how P&P didn't belong in Yuletide because it was a mega-juggernaut on some forums somewhere, though not on FFN and AO3.
> 
> Cf. shinelikethunder's comments on Tolkien and Les Mis fandoms not fitting canned "Media Fandom" molds. Those few book fandoms that are big (and not Harry Potter) are kind of their own deal. One shouldn't assume they conform closely to a generic "Everything comes from K/S" American TV fandom style.

> melannen replied to your post “Hey, sorry to ask this, but a few days ago I saw a post/discussion…”  
This is interesting because in my memory of the debate, there was a lot of a) Austen fandom, with a long tradition of original Regencies as fanfic; tabletop/sdf fandom, where the line between “this is a fanfic of a dnd campaign” and “this is my novel” never existed, and also the tradition of Lovecraft et al; history rpf, where if you’re not writing tropey slash the line is super thin.

Aaaand you have detected what I meant with that oblique “People came up with other evidence.”

Austen fandom is often a big question mark to people not in it. Just think of all those times P&P ended up in yuletide, people complained it was non-rare, and everyone else was like: “But I don’t see it on the sites I’m on!”

Basically, all that stuff you mention was yet a _different_ fandom divide, but one that was less fraught and one that had nothing to do with anime vs. western fandom stuff. It’s also not all m/m, which was one of the sticking points in early conversations.

My memory is that this other set of stuff came up fairly late in the debate and formed the tipping point.


	6. This…explains a lot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted: January 28, 2020.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/190522189414/hey-sorry-to-ask-this-but-a-few-days-ago-i-saw-a
> 
> Copperbadge commented: "This…explains a lot about the response I got when I asked if I could post my non-fanfic novel on AO3, actually. [...] it felt a little like I was making some kind of legal challenge nobody wanted to make a ruling on."

Indeed, you were. Indeed, you were. Heh.

To be honest, the _real_ definition is “That non-fic stuff part X of fandom mixes in with the fic. Plus that non-fic stuff that part Y of fandom mixes in with the fic. Plus…”

If you’re never in those parts of fandom, it’s hard to get a feel for which things those are. It’s very _I know it when I see it_. But that’s no basis for an archive rule that needs to be fair and enforceable.

I can’t give a good exhaustive list, but I can give a good example:

Back in ye olden days of slash zines, you’d find some zine publishers putting out a bit of original m/m, either mixed into a multifandom zine or as a standalone zine being advertised and sold to the same crowd that bought the fic zines. Those stories had a very fanfic-y vibe in terms of the author’s voice and the tropes used. They were also _socially_ a part of slash fandom.

“M/M romance” as a genre of commercial book ranges from stuff that’s cis gay male lit-style to stuff that’s original but full of fanfic-y tropes to stuff that’s very blatantly former fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. If you read widely in m/m romance, you could sort a big stack of books into three piles. So could the other readers. And your judgment calls would be almost identical.

Fanfic is, in many ways, a _genre_.

Or a number of genres in different fic communities, really. (And yes, I’d be happy to tl;dr about what would be in those three stacks of books, and there are _totally_ cis gay men who choose to write in slash fandom style instead of cis gay lit style. These aren’t hard and fast categories about who people _are_. They’re artistic choices.)

Anyway, a lot of what makes original work show up in fannish space is social dynamics within a particular subculture at a particular time or, sometimes, the impossibility of traditional publishing.

In the modern day, with dozens of fannish subcultures crashing into each other _and_ with tons of fans finding fic by googling a canon name without being deeply embedded in a social scene _and_ with the barriers to publishing some random ebook on amazon so low, a lot of this historical context is lost.

_We know it when we see it_, and you’re probably going to have to take our word on that.


End file.
